SocraticGadfly: Dawkins and Dennett -- willful tar babies to Behe and Dembski?

February 16, 2005

Dawkins and Dennett -- willful tar babies to Behe and Dembski?

That's exactly the charge leveled against the two “neo-Darwinian bulldogs” by Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew in the great new book “Debating Design.”

DD, coedited by Dembski and Michael Ruse, has an overview chapter for both the evolutionary and the ID sides.

It then has four main sections of four chapters each.

The first goes to orthodox Darwinians. The fourth goes to IDers.

The third goes to theistic evolutionists who don't necessary accept the natural theology (i.e. the compulsion to develop an argument to design) of IDers.

The second section is led off by Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, one of the leading proponents and developers of self-organized complexity in biological evolution, as part of a larger focus on issues of complexity theory in general.

He is followed by Weber and Depew. Not in any way sympathetic to IDers, they nevertheless also excoriate Dennett and Dawkins as “hyperadaptationists" and charge that they, the DDers, deliberately take a polar opposition to BeDemski, who in turn in developing new speculation, go with something guaranteed to generate a polar response from the DDers.

To the degree that I believe elements of complexity theory, including evolution by parallel processes, lie outside of at least a narrow reading of orthdox neo-Darwinianism, I think the authors have a very valid point.

Remember, contesting unscientific speculation being passed off as scientific undercutting of the validity of evolutionary processes in general does not mean holding a rabid partisan ship for any one narrow and particularist neo-Darwinism.

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